Yaak Valley group seeks more analysis for Black Ram project

Chad Benson, forest supervisor for the Kootenai National Forest, declared in a draft decision December that the 95,000-acre plus Black Ram project did not require an environmental impact statement.

The Yaak Valley Forest Council sees it differently.

The council contends the Forest Service must perform a more detailed and rigorous analysis of the proposed project’s effects.

On Jan. 24, the council submitted a formal objection to the Forest Service’s draft decision conclusion that an environmental assessment provided adequate analysis.

The Black Ram project would be located north and west of Troy. As proposed, it would include commercial timber harvests on more than 4,000 acres, construction of more than three miles of new roads, prescribed burns, intermediate harvests in old growth, completion of fuel breaks in one location, new recreational trails, more than 2,000 acres of “regeneration harvests” and more.

Regeneration harvests essentially remove existing trees in a stand and start over to — in theory — create a healthier stand.

Benson said the Forest Service’s 533-page environmental assessment determined that the agency’s preferred alternative for the Black Ram project “will not have significant effects on the quality of the human environment considering the context and intensity of impacts.”

The Yaak Valley Forest Council’s objection is based partly on the Forest Service’s acknowledgement that the project “is likely to adversely affect grizzly bears,” a threatened species. A small population of grizzlies lives in the Black Ram project area.

The council and others have described this population of grizzlies in the Yaak as especially vulnerable to road building, timber cutting and other human-driven intrusion into their core habitat.

Jane Jacoby, conservation director for the Yaak Valley Forest Council, said in a Jan. 24 news release that the proposed Black Ram project has the “potential to harm a delicate grizzly bear population.”

Jacoby said the environmental assessment offered insufficient analysis of this and other project impacts.

“Given the size and sensitivity of the project area, it requires an environmental impact statement,” Jacoby said. “If not here, then where?”

The Forest Service says the Black Ram project’s focus “is to manage the forest stands in the project area to maintain or improve their resilience to disturbances such as drought, insect and disease outbreaks and wildfires.”

It suggests that activities tied to the Black Ram project “may result in short-term adverse effects to grizzly bears” and “temporary disturbance and avoidance of the affected areas” by grizzlies.”

Rick Bass, an author well known in the Yaak for environmental activism, is chairman of the Yaak Valley Forest Council.

In a news release, Bass noted that the Forest Service “also claimed that 2,000 acres of regeneration harvests, many in critical core habitat, won’t affect bears significantly, and that Yaak grizzlies have no need for deeper analysis.”

“We disagree,” he said.

He has described the environmental assessment as “abstract, vague, often contradictory.”

Meanwhile, the American Forest Resource Council, a nonprofit trade association that advocates for the forest products industry, has expressed general support for the Black Ram project. It noted in comments in August that it would like to see more acreage available for timber harvests.

The AFRC says it advocates for “sustained yield timber harvests on public timberlands throughout the West to enhance forest health and resistance to fire, insects and disease.”

In its submitted comments, the AFRC said it “would like to remind the Forest [Service] that the National Forests in Montana are very important for providing the raw materials that sawmills within the state need to operate since so much of the forests are owned by the Forest Service.”

In August, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, founded in 1997, sued the Forest Service because of concerns about the impact of the Pacific Northwest Trail on the Yaak’s small population of grizzly bears. It was the first litigation in the group’s history.